He paused an instant: then a light broke over his face, and his burst of quiet laughter was infinitely pleasant to hear. Rose got redder and redder. She realised dimly that she was hardly maintaining the spirit of their contract, and that he was studying her with eyes inconveniently bright and penetrating.
"Shall I quote to you," he said, "a sentence of Sterne"s? If it violate our contract I must plead extenuating circ.u.mstances. Sterne is admonishing a young friend as to his manners in society: "You are in love," he says. "_Tant mieux._ But do not imagine that the fact bestows on you a licence to behave like a bear towards all the rest of the world. _Affection may surely conduct thee through an avenue of women to her who possesses thy heart without tearing the flounces of any of their petticoats_"--not even those of little cousins of seventeen! I say this, you will observe, in the capacity you have a.s.signed me. In another capacity I venture to think I could justify myself still better."
"My guardian and director," cried Rose, "must not begin his functions by misleading and sophistical quotations from the cla.s.sics!"
He did not answer for a moment. They were at the gate of Burwood, under a thick screen of wild cherry trees. The gate was half open, and his hand was on it.
"And my pupil," he said, bending to her, "must not begin by challenging the prisoner whose hands she has bound, or he will not answer for the consequences!"
His words were threatening, but his voice, his fine expressive face, were infinitely sweet. By a kind of fascination she never afterwards understood, Rose for answer startled him and herself. She bent her head; she laid her lips on the hand which held the gate, and then she was through it in an instant. He followed her in vain. He never overtook her till at the drawing-room door she paused with amazing dignity.
"Mamma," she said, throwing it open, "here is Mr. Flaxman. He is come from Norway, and is on his way to Ullswater. I will go and speak to Margaret about tea."
CHAPTER XLVIII
After the little incident recorded at the end of the preceding chapter, Hugh Flaxman may be forgiven if, as he walked home along the valley that night towards the farmhouse where he had established himself, he entertained a very comfortable scepticism as to the permanence of that curious contract into which Rose had just forced him. However, he was quite mistaken. Rose"s maiden dignity avenged itself abundantly on Hugh Flaxman for the injuries it had received at the hands of Langham. The restraints, the anomalies, the hairsplittings of the situation delighted her ingenuous youth. "I am free--he is free. We will be friends for six months. Possibly we may not suit one another at all. If we do--_then_----"
In the thrill of that _then_ lay, of course, the whole attraction of the position.
So that next morning Hugh Flaxman saw the comedy was to be scrupulously kept up. It required a tolerably strong masculine certainty at the bottom of him to enable him to resign himself once more to his part. But he achieved it, and being himself a modern of the moderns, a lover of half-shades and refinements of all sorts, he began very soon to enjoy it, and to play it with an increasing cleverness and perfection.
How Rose got through Agnes"s cross-questioning on the matter history sayeth not. Of one thing, however, a conscientious historian may be sure, namely, that Agnes succeeded in knowing as much as she wanted to know. Mrs. Leyburn was a little puzzled by the erratic lines of Mr.
Flaxman"s journeys. It was, as she said, curious that a man should start on a tour through the Lakes from Long Whindale.
But she took everything navely as it came, and as she was told. Nothing with her ever pa.s.sed through any changing crucible of thought. It required no planning to elude her. Her mind was like a stretch of wet sand, on which all impressions are equally easy to make and equally fugitive. He liked them all, she supposed, in spite of the comparative scantiness of his later visits to Lerwick Gardens, or he would not have come out of his way to see them. But as n.o.body suggested anything else to her, her mind worked no further, and she was as easily beguiled after his appearance as before it by the intricacies of some new knitting.
Things of course might have been different if Mrs. Thornburgh had interfered again; but, as we know, poor Catherine"s sorrows had raised a whole odd host of misgivings in the mind of the vicar"s wife. She prowled nervously round Mrs. Leyburn, filled with contempt for her placidity; but she did not attack her. She spent herself, indeed, on Rose and Agnes, but long practice had made them adepts in the art of baffling her; and when Mr. Flaxman went to tea at the vicarage in their company, in spite of an absorbing desire to get at the truth, which caused her to forget a new cap, and let fall a plate of tea-cakes, she was obliged to confess crossly to the vicar afterwards that "no one could tell what a man like that was after. She supposed his manners were very aristocratic, but for her part she liked plain people."
On the last morning of Mr. Flaxman"s stay in the valley he entered the Burwood drive about eleven o"clock, and Rose came down the steps to meet him. For a moment he flattered himself that her disturbed looks were due to the nearness of their farewells.
"There is something wrong," he said, softly detaining her hand a moment--so much, at least, was in his right.
"Robert is ill. There has been an accident at Pet.i.tes Dalles. He has been in bed for a week. They hope to get home in a few days. Catherine writes bravely, but she is evidently very low."
Hugh Flaxman"s face fell. Certain letters he had received from Elsmere in July had lain heavy on his mind ever since, so pitiful was the half-conscious revelation in them of an incessant physical struggle. An accident! Elsmere was in no state for accidents. What miserable ill-luck!
Rose read him Catherine"s account. It appeared that on a certain stormy day a swimmer had been observed in difficulties among the rocks skirting the northern side of the Pet.i.tes Dalles bay. The old _baigneur_ of the place, owner of the still primitive _etabliss.e.m.e.nt des bains_, without stopping to strip, or even to take off his heavy boots, went out to the man in danger with a plank. The man took the plank and was safe. Then to the people watching, it became evident that the _baigneur_ himself was in peril. He became unaccountably feeble in the water, and the cry rose that he was sinking. Robert, who happened to be bathing near, ran off to the spot, jumped in, and swam out. By this time the old man had drifted some way. Robert succeeded, however, in bringing him in, and then, amid an excited crowd, headed by the _baigneur"s_ wailing family, they carried the unconscious form on to the higher beach. Elsmere was certain life was not extinct, and sent off for a doctor. Meanwhile no one seemed to have any common sense, or any knowledge of how to proceed, but himself. For two hours he stayed on the beach in his dripping bathing-clothes, a cold wind blowing, trying every device known to him: rubbing, hot bottles, artificial respiration. In vain. The man was too old and too bloodless. Directly after the doctor arrived he breathed his last, amid the wild and pa.s.sionate grief of wife and children.
Robert, with a cloak flung about him, still stayed to talk to the doctor, to carry one of the _baigneur"s_ sobbing grandchildren to its mother in the village. Then, at last, Catherine got hold of him, and he submitted to be taken home, shivering, and deeply depressed by the failure of his efforts. A violent gastric and lung chill declared itself almost immediately, and for three days he had been anxiously ill.
Catherine, miserable, distrusting the local doctor, and not knowing how to get hold of a better one, had never left him night or day. "I had not the heart to write even to you," she wrote to her mother. "I could think of nothing but trying one thing after another. Now he has been in bed eight days, and is much better. He talks of getting up to-morrow, and declares he must go home next week. I have tried to persuade him to stay here another fortnight, but the thought of his work distresses him so much that I hardly dare urge it. I cannot say how I dread the journey.
He is not fit for it in any way."
Rose folded up the letter, her face softened to a most womanly gravity.
Hugh Flaxman paused a moment outside the door, his hands on his sides, considering.
"I shall not go on to Scotland," he said; "Mrs. Elsmere must not be left. I will go off there at once."
In Rose"s soberly-sweet looks as he left her, Hugh Flaxman saw for an instant, with the stirring of a joy as profound as it was delicate, not the fanciful enchantress of the day before, but his wife that was to be.
And yet she held him to his bargain. All that his lips touched as he said good-bye was the little bunch of yellow briar roses she gave him from her belt.
Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from Sa.s.setot to Pet.i.tes Dalles. It was the 1st of September. A chilly west wind blew up the dust before him and stirred the parched leaf.a.ge of the valley. He knocked at the door, of which the woodwork was all peeled and blistered by the sun. Catherine herself opened it.
"This is kind--this is like yourself!" she said, after a first stare of amazement, when he had explained himself. "He is in there, much better."
Robert looked up, stupefied, as Hugh Flaxman entered. But he sprang up with his old brightness.
"Well, this _is_ friendship! What on earth brings you here, old fellow?
Why aren"t you in the stubbles celebrating St. Partridge?"
Hugh Flaxman said what he had to say very shortly, but so as to make Robert"s eyes gleam, and to bring his thin hand with a sort of caressing touch upon Flaxman"s shoulder.
"I shan"t try to thank you--Catherine can if she likes. How relieved she will be about that bothering journey of ours! However, I am really ever so much better. It was very sharp while it lasted; and the doctor no great shakes. But there never was such a woman as my wife; she pulled me through! And now then, sir, just kindly confess yourself a little more plainly. What brought you and my sisters-in-law together? You need not try and persuade _me_ that Long Whindale is the natural gate of the Lakes, or the route intended by Heaven from London to Scotland, though I have no doubt you tried that little fiction on them."
Hugh Flaxman laughed, and sat down very deliberately.
"I am glad to see that illness has not robbed you of that perspicacity for which you are so remarkable, Elsmere. Well, the day before yesterday I asked your sister Rose to marry me. She----"
"Go on, man," cried Robert, exasperated by his pause.
"I don"t know how to put it," said Flaxman calmly. "For six months we are to be rather more than friends, and a good deal less than _fiances_.
I am to be allowed to write to her. You may imagine how seductive it is to one of the worst and laziest letter-writers in the three kingdoms that his fortunes in love should be made to depend on his correspondence. I may scold her _if_ she gives me occasion. And in six months, as one says to a publisher, "the agreement will be open to revision.""
Robert stared.
"And you are not engaged?"
"Not as I understand it," replied Flaxman. "Decidedly not!" he added with energy, remembering that very platonic farewell.
Robert sat with his hands on his knees, ruminating.
"A fantastic thing, the modern young woman! Still I think I can understand. There may have been more than mere caprice in it."
His eye met his friend"s significantly.
"I suppose so," said Flaxman quietly. Not even for Robert"s benefit was he going to reveal any details of that scene on High Fell "Never mind, old fellow, I am content. And, indeed, _faute de mieux_, I should be content with anything that brought me nearer to her, were it but by the thousandth of an inch."
Robert grasped his hand affectionately.
"Catherine," he called through the door, "never mind the supper; let it burn. Flaxman brings news."
Catherine listened to the story with amazement. Certainly her ways would never have been as her sister"s.
"Are we supposed to know?" she asked, very naturally.
"She never forbade me to tell," said Flaxman smiling. "I think, however, if I were you, I should say nothing about it--yet. I told her it was part of our bargain that _she_ should explain my letters to Mrs.